The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

June 22, 2010

Joanna Klink

Joanna Klink [USA]1969

Joanna Klink was born in 1969 in Iowa City, Iowa, where she grew up. She attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and later earned a Ph.D in Humanities from the Johns Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Iowa.

Her first book, They Are Sleeping, won the Contemporary Poetry Series through the University of Georgia Press and was published in December 2000. Her second book of poems, Circadian, takes as its guiding vision circadian clocks, the internal time clocks of organisms that regulate rhythms of sleeping and waking. Affected by the presence and withdrawal of light, these clocks influence, among other things, the opening and closing of flowers, the speed at which the heart pumps blood, and the migratory patterns of birds.

Klink is also writing a book length lyric meditation titled Strangeness. A hybrid of forms—prose poem, essay, and biography—Strangeness is at once an introduction to the life and poetry of Paul Celan; an extended reflection on Celan's search for a reader; an exploration of the strangeness of poetry in general; and a defense of the obscure or difficult poem in an age in which more straightforward poems tend to be popular.

A recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award in 2003, Klink teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Montana.

╬Winner of the PIP Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry in English2005-2006

Into the Kitchen a Light

Into the kitchen a lightrays down quiet. A privatesense of absence in my everydaypatterns—of disservice, breath,or words pulled into my ribsprying apart my errors fromthe hopes that made them—and outside the window coatedin soot from winds that comeall winter, some process hasceased—although birdsdrop and lift off the roof,aerial sweeps, or just bursts offeather, wings, claws, and the leapof heart I would have,should I be so brightly alteredwith the chances of life,a reparation I feel gatheringin my lungs, zero in the pitch,scarlet wing, most unnaturalsound held in the dimthreshold of my throat—or am I less than I was—and fear I can't distinguishthe delicate blue current insidethe light from the pain in my voiceor the early morning fog laid overthe grass from the voicethat underlies everything